[HN Gopher] What the Internet Was Like in 1998
___________________________________________________________________
What the Internet Was Like in 1998
Author : herbertl
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-07-15 22:16 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cybercultural.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cybercultural.com)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| A lot of people were already partying like it was 1999 :)
|
| Some of them had quite a head start too, considering Prince wrote
| the song back in 1982 ;)
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Never stopped.
| asdff wrote:
| Ironically people at the time were not discounting Y2K going
| awry. Parents told me years later that new years was spent a
| bit more tense with the cellar stocked with cans and booze. We
| make fun of it now but people had concerns about the supply
| chain and what might result from that if everything borked at
| once. I guess the guys in Office Space managed to save the
| world in time (initech in that movie was patching fintech
| software for y2k).
| ghaff wrote:
| Some people definitely worried and many others spent many
| hours remediating systems in the year or two before.
|
| Personally, I was in Quebec City on a group ski and party
| trip :-)
| jmclnx wrote:
| In 98, I was still using ftp and USENET, WEB was still a few
| years off for me.
| rconti wrote:
| Yeah, bit hard for me to remember. I switched to Linux in 1995
| around the time Windows 95 came out, because my 486/DX33
| computer, with 4MB of RAM, wouldn't run it so I was going to be
| left behind anyway. 16MB of RAM (the only sensible upgrade due
| to stick sizes) would have been a colossal $400 ($840 today).
|
| Plus, on Windows 3.1, SLiRP/PPP + Trumpet Winsock was only
| barely usable for timelines and reasons I can't quite remember,
| so much of my internet life was through a shell account anyway;
| it made more sense to run Linux locally and have a native
| experience, rather than living on the internet through some
| piece of dialup modem terminal emulation software.
|
| Though, after installing Linux, with only 4MB of RAM,
| rebuilding the kernel took 8 hours. I didn't actually realize
| this was abnormal, or that the drive thrashing I heard at the
| time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.
|
| It could start X, but only very, very slowly
|
| At some point later I got a Cyrix 5x86/133 (o/c'd to 160) with
| 16MB. Probably around 97-98. At that point, the graphical web
| became a reality for me as well.
|
| Otherwise, it was interactive stuff via telnet/ftp/usenet, and
| plenty of lynx for web.
| asdff wrote:
| > drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather
| than just normal code compilation.
|
| Funny how that was such a signal back then. Did the program
| crash? Lets listen. No, I can still hear it, its just taking
| its time. I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize the
| noise was coming from the drives and that wasn't the sound a
| cpu under load makes. Maybe a cpu under load noise (or an
| increasing brightness light) would actually be useful in some
| contexts: no need to hop on and run htop just look from
| across the room.
| anthk wrote:
| Once you got a svgalib image viewer, it didn't really matter
| a lot.
|
| For newcomers, a similar experience would be using the
| framebuffer and running slrn against the NNTP servers from
| https://www.eternal-september.org, using IRC (still alive
| too) and using trickle to throttle down your connection to
| 56k or ISDN speeds if you were lucky.
|
| Oh, an MUDs, of course.
|
| Today you can get a similar feeling with http://wiby.me with
| tons of personal sites.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| My favorite commercial from those days:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BPIpWMCKEbk&pp=ygUeQWx0YSB2aXN...
| alexjplant wrote:
| Mine was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2YhXQaNiY4
|
| Of course this device didn't actually exist in the consumer
| market. Half of my aunts and uncles worked for IBM and none of
| them knew anything about it. From cruising the YouTube comments
| it looks like a simpler version of the system had a few
| industrial applications but nothing remotely like the
| commercial. With AR glasses I think we're pretty much there
| nowadays but most people would rather use Robinhood and AirPods
| on an iPhone to do the same without bothering pigeons or
| looking like a weirdo on public transit.
| rconti wrote:
| The instant I saw the first frame I remembered having seen
| it... but I don't remember any of the content with the boy!
|
| What does the search engine prompt say? I couldn't read it.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| It says "How can I beat Karpov's (illegible) gambit".
| Something like that.
| Apreche wrote:
| Slow
| riedel wrote:
| Seeing the wired screenshots I was immediately missing hotbot
| [1]. The colours even hurt in the days, but I used it a lot.
| Actually I was surprised that it still exists
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980208062232/http://www.hotbot...
|
| Edit: seems like it only became kind of a search engine again in
| 2023 under completely different ownership :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot
| dehrmann wrote:
| Also no Metacrawler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Seems like yesterday.
| bni wrote:
| You can still experience 1998 Internet by using and old computer
| or emulator and configure it to use protoweb.org
| TrackerFF wrote:
| One thing I remember from those days, was how meteoric the google
| rise was. Prior to google I (and most I know) used Altavista.
| When we got around trying google, there was no way back. And then
| the years that followed with awesome products from google.
| ghaff wrote:
| I used a couple others too but, yeah, pre-Google mostly
| Altavista. Funnily enough, the product guy on Altavista was the
| person most responsible for hiring me into my kast job.
| Sharlin wrote:
| I wonder how many people actually used those portals, as in
| clicked the links and browsed the directories. I don't think I
| ever did, but I was just a teenager and not American, so maybe I
| wasn't in the target audience?
| asdff wrote:
| I used the SBC global one as a homepage. It was cool, you could
| customize it quite a lot which was its own sort of fun. I was a
| kid then too.
| dboreham wrote:
| Enough people used them to make them worth billions, in 1998 $.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Many ISPs set a portal as your browsers homepage with their
| installers. Most people didn't know how to manually set up
| dial-up networking and would just run an installer their ISP
| provided. Since they didn't know how/why a portal was set they
| just assumed it was how things were.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| In the early days the portals were great and you could find
| most anything by browsing them; click on topic, go through the
| subtopics and get a list of websites on that topic, if those
| did not have the information you needed you went to the links
| pages/web rings on those sites and you would get what you
| needed soon enough. It was quicker than scrolling through pages
| and pages of modern day google results and trying to game the
| search terms. These were all personal pages you would be
| browsing and one of the things you would do in those days to
| get your page noticed is register it on Yahoo and the like. You
| were able to explore the internet in a way you can't anymore.
| SpaceL10n wrote:
| My grandmother's ISP offered games and such that could be played
| over dial up and would incur additional fees on the phone bill,
| per minute... Crazy times.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Blue links, slow, new, exciting, portal to a new world, free, no
| social media facebook/etc walled gardens, pre-enshittification
| zahlman wrote:
| Seriously, I miss the reliable blue underlined links like you
| wouldn't believe.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| In the UK ISPs used to advertise how my megabytes of web space
| you got, how much Usenet you got, how many ISP-only email
| addresses were allocated, etc.
|
| Most people used modems to dial up paying the local call rate
| (the ISPs got a cut of this so the longer you stayed on the more
| they earned) and as a result your computer was directly connected
| so people could (and did) portscan your machine directly.
|
| Every site was http by default and only switched to https when
| you were going to buy something.
|
| Web rings were a big thing and so was Yahoo. Search engines let
| you use search terms that were case sensitive (so "Python" got
| you comedy results and "python" got you information on snakes).
|
| Big corporate didn't dominate then like it does now and it was a
| lot more fun, lots to explore and find.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| I worked for an ISP (Telinco/Northwest Net), that was a
| whitelabeller - two weeks before Freeserve launched in 1998
| with no monthly fee and was paid for through 0845 chargeback,
| we launched Connect Free on the same premise, and then
| whitelabelled it - Totalise, Currant Bun (which was from the
| Sun newspaper - a newspaper had its own ISP!), and others.
| Eventually that firm became World Online and then Tiscali and
| today it's all TalkTalk.
|
| The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers.
| Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which
| provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some
| webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from
| upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We
| also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like.
|
| I built the signup scripts which would also provision email
| addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the
| RADIUS servers so you could dial in.
|
| When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit.
| There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy
| PS500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and
| provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS
| stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a
| rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree
| over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a
| stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic
| branch), all while just living Summer vibes.
|
| We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the
| phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become
| a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working
| from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse
| which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at
| the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C.
|
| Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my
| professional life.
|
| We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but
| would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest
| major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub
| for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the
| next day, and then go back and do it all again.
|
| Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people
| paying PS10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever
| they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary
| service (our callout/support structure was based on us being
| benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we
| had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS
| response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start
| of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was
| wonderful.
|
| I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this
| Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to
| have that feeling once more.
|
| It'll never happen, but wow, what a time.
| asdff wrote:
| I feel like I missed a lot of the early internet while it was
| happening because I had dialup and it was already a DSL/cable era
| pretty fast by the end of the 90s. So many times you'd click an
| image link and go "ehh maybe I didn't care enough to see it after
| all" after it only loaded 10% of the pixels after way too long. I
| couldn't even play runescape for years; the site at the time ran
| a speed test and would just tell me my connection was too slow
| not even letting me into the world to test. Parents would set an
| egg timer for computer usage so every second counted which only
| added to the frustration and stress.
| Ozarkian wrote:
| The Million Dollar Web Page is still up!
|
| Back during the dotcom craze, you could buy a pixel for $1. It
| was a 1000x1000 image, so the value was a million dollars. Some
| teenager did it.
|
| Amazingly, it's still up. Although all or nearly all the links
| are broker or point to somthing different than what was
| originally there...
|
| http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
| conradfr wrote:
| Given the link rot and that this page still have thousand of
| visitors per day (according to Wikipedia) it's amazing that he
| never added a resell service. Maybe the original pixels owners
| are hard to track though.
| reddalo wrote:
| I still remember all the useless copycats (especially in other
| languages) cropping up after the success of the Million Dollar
| Home Page.
|
| I wonder how the guy that created it managed to make it so
| viral that he sold out all of the pixels in a short time.
| alhadrad wrote:
| https://wiby.me/surprise/
| gmuslera wrote:
| For me Google came out in 1997, as beta and probably without the
| current domain name, but being back that time reader of Slashdot
| it was hard not to miss it.
|
| And it was magic compared with everything else that were around
| back then.
| theodric wrote:
| Yeah, I remember that. The first search engine that wasn't
| absolute trash. Metafind/Dogpile only helped because they
| merged all the terrible results onto one page so you could be
| frustrated by them with one click. Access to information (and
| the quantity of available information, including about topics
| from the 90s) now is SO MUCH BETTER than it was in the 90s.
| seaghost wrote:
| I was waking up at 3 or 4 AM to download software as the internet
| was the fastest at that time of the day.
| js2 wrote:
| Graduated with a CS degree in 1996. Went to work right away for a
| media company helping run all their web sites. (A few dozen Ultra
| 2s on a FDDI network connected to NetApps. Served mostly by
| Apache. A couple beefier boxes serving dynamic content using Perl
| CGI scripts. The horrid Netscape Server to run early backend
| JavaScript. Management over a frame relay network. Had friends at
| Excite, Equinix, etc.)
|
| (In college on the side, I ran a tiny local ISP with a couple
| dozen Hayes modems connected to a Livingston Portmaster. T1
| uplink. A couple PCs running Linux. Before college I had been
| hanging out on AOL giving technical advice, and before that was
| using an Apple II dialing into BBS's.)
|
| Which is all to say, I was there for all of this and this piece
| is pretty much spot on.
|
| When the movie _Frequency_ (which has a communicating across time
| aspect) was made in 2000, the company the screen writers went to
| for how to get rich by investing in the right stock? Yahoo.
|
| https://youtu.be/9rzVftbbiBo
| zh3 wrote:
| Going back a few years (from 1998), it was all dial-up and I was
| working in London on a stand-by. Happened to be paired with
| someone I respct, so I showed him "the internet" - pretty much
| Pat Sharp and mtv.com back then.
|
| Headline story on mtv.com was Kurt Cobain was dead - I was like
| "Wow!". Guy I was working with was "yeah, it was in the papers a
| few days ago.".
|
| It's an abiding memory, maybe has coloured my view of the rise of
| the internet, just sharing a dusty anecdote.
| usr1106 wrote:
| 1998 the game was already lost, although we could not imagine how
| evil Google would become and many others did not exist yet.
| Eternal September was 1993 after all
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September.
|
| In 1989 when I started to use internet, someone being on the
| internet meant they could be trusted. Private internet did not
| exist, so all users were basically university employees. I
| visited people and invited people from other countries without
| knowing them. Sending a couple of emails, and everything was
| fine. I sent bills to a money collector overseas and the cheque
| was in the mail a couple of weeks later.
| pan69 wrote:
| If your interested in this era, also check out the Code Rush
| documentary.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
| rossant wrote:
| 1998 was the year I made my first website in pure HTML and, IIRC,
| CSS. There were two versions, one for 800x600 monitors or less,
| and one for 1024x768 and higher.
| zafka wrote:
| If you want to see a website from that era see: http://zafka.com
| While a few changes have been made, the "style" remains
| unchanged.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-19 23:01 UTC)